Argentine Dispatch #2

I can't believe it's been almost a month. I've already started making plans for Monday's exit, and it's tinged the rest of the week for me. I was afraid an entire month without work would turn into sheer boredom, but I barely notice that I'm not occupied. I guess the structure of the days here in the Interior with their observance of siestas and the meals at strange hours has helped make the time fly. My family and friends work in jobs with more varied hours as well, so I've spent much less time than I anticipated in "entertaining myself" as we like to put it. I'm happy to have spent so much more time in conversation but my journal is woefully out of date. I believe the entry I have to finish is from October 2nd - at the beginning of Buenos Aires, before Patagonia, before my return and all the important conversations I've been having. Am. screwed.

I've had irregular internet access through travel and then problems with modems here. I wanted to post more, but I'll try to journal events and I'll keep writing Argentine Dispatches when I get home. Hubster took the laptop home with him so I'd have one less valuable item to secure everywhere I went. It was a good idea, but I sure would like to type my thoughts more than write them. It's faster and the pencil-and-paper method makes my inner editor cringe and mutter curses after a while. All this to try to remember, to hold on to the memories and the stories and the mental images.

I'm sitting in my friends' study, the family with whom we'd stay when we weren't with our relatives here in the Interior. Their daughter is about to arrive. We were best friends when we were little, and our families renewed our acquaintance with trips even when we moved to Patagonia. I went to school with her on our 6-week visit in '97. She wrote notes to me in a notebook and conjugated verbs on its pages for me to memorize. One page is titled in bold pink marker: "The Four Most Important Verbs in Life." Below it appear the present tenses for amar, comer, dormir, and comprar. I guess if I can say I've loved, eaten, slept, and bought that about covers the basics even today. She visited my family in the States for three months. The youngest with three older brothers, she lived like my sister during that time, and we loved it after lifetimes spent with just our brothers. She danced swing with my friends, slept on my bunk beds, borrowed my uniform sweaters for school, and backed me up in arguments with my brothers. It was awesome.

She left and went back home. She started med school at university in Córdoba, met her boyfriend more recently and became an aunt as her older brothers started families. I went to college, met my husband, graduated, got married, moved and worked. I'm hoping somehow that our friendship has once again survived the deep freeze of distance and time.

We'll be sleeping in twin beds in the same room. Maybe that'll jog our memories.